The Catalyst School - Website

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This is a side proposal to the Catalyst School
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-Catalyst-School/367842-48088

The Catalyst School website will be a place to offer students a way to establish contact with resources, teachers and other students in an interactive way.

It will consist of an additional layer of features built on top of the resources to enrich the overall experience and provide different learning solutions using different methods and approaches.

The architecture of the website will not include resources and courses/workshops content: they will be stored on a public Git repository with an Open Source license and they will be accessible to anyone.

The website will include a mechanism to import in an automatic way these resources and content linking them with the features aimed at students.

Features included in the website:

- Import mechanism from Git and Markdown of resources / courses / workshops

• Using a defined standard in the Markdown file organization it will be possible to parse and import the content in the website environment

- Courses and Workshops

• Content and resources from the public repo can be reorganized in new courses / workshops
• Getting feedback for oneself is very important, we want to build an initial quiz for students to self-test their gained knowledge.

- Quiz & Test

• For each course and lesson it will possible to create quiz and tests that the students can use to self-evaluate their progresses and gamifying the learning experience

- Questions

• Students will be able to ask questions through the website, contributing to the creation of a FAQ section for each resource.

- Events and Calendar

• A specific section of the website will collect all the events related to the Catalyst School (like workshops in the After / Eastern Town Hall)
• Students will be able to subscribe to an event in order to get updates
• Events could be in a private form and created by the students to incentivize the creation of study groups

- Students registration

• Progress tracking of specific courses (tracking by lessons completed, final quiz, test, etc.)
• Follow-up emails and Mailing list
• Creation of study groups
• Certification -> NFT certifications with side-proposal

- Multilanguage support

Technical specifications

The website will be developed using the open source framework Laravel.

As described before the website will act as an additional layer of features for the students, and the content and resources will be imported / parsed and mapped from an external Git repository.

Therefore, the domain model of the website will include the "imported/mapped" models integrating them with all the entities required for the features.

Here is the Domain Model draft: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_l-LVKTI=/?moveToWidget=3074457362542502107&cot=10

According to the last Laravel 8 guidelines, the website will be developed using an Inertia.js frontend implementation powered by Vue.js

The use of Inertia.js allows us to build a fully Javascript SPA (Single Page Application) frontend with Vue.js, without adding the usual complexity of keeping track of two different environments / projects (usually an API to serve data and a JS client for the frontend).

This will be particularly useful in terms of project development and maintenance.

The website will also include a public API, limited to specific resources (e.g. Courses, Events, etc.) which will be publicly available. 

Development roadmap & Milestones

• Dev - Basic environment setup (1st week)
• Design - visual identity for the website (1st week)
• Design - Sitemap definition (2nd week)
• Design - Wireframe definition (3rd week)
• Design - Graphics layout development (6th week)
• Dev - Domain Model implementation (3rd week)
• Dev - Import mechanism from Git / Markdown / Gitbook (5th week)
• Dev - Controllers / Frontend for: Courses / Workshops, Students Profile, Questions (8th week)
• Dev - Controllers / Frontend for: Quiz&Test, Events and Calendar (10th week)
• Dev - BETA release (11th week)
• Dev - Auditing, feedback, bug-fixing (13th week)
• Dev - PUBLIC release (14th week)

KPIs

• Monthly unique visitors
• Backlinks
• Registered users goal for F7: 50 proposers
• Registered users goal for F7: 100 CAs
• Registered users goal for F7: 25 vCAs
• Avg. users course completion
• Users satisfaction (based on a feedback form)

The Team

We believe that collaboration is the key for the success of Catalyst… and it couldn't be different with this project!

We are a group of 11 people of diverse backgrounds, but two common passions: Catalyst and education.

Go on and get to know our team:

• Alejo Escrivá: Product & Growth Marketing consultor, business analytics MBA, Industrial Designer, and Entrepreneur with 8+ years shaping lovable products and communities. Founder @Cardano-Hispano.
• Dominik Tilman: Community Advisor, funded proposer, Catalyst Swarm core member, business background
• Felix Weber: enthusiast & community networker, T&M's elected representative for the 1st Catalyst Circle, co-founder of Catalyst Swarm, co-initiator & coordinator of the Eastern Hemisphere Town Hall, initiator of the Catalyst Alliance.
• George Lovegrove: Web / mobile developer, active community member and projectcatalyst.org creator that helps improve Catalyst resources and tooling.
• Kerstin Nobel: Digital education researcher, university lecturer for digital education in Germany and Luxembourg, academic peer-reviewer, Community Advisor (CA).
• Lucio Baglione: Web / mobile developer with 9+ years of experience. CA and vCA, co-creator of the Community Tools (Proposer/CA/vCA/Voter Tools).
• Raz Samsudin: Interdisciplinary trained academic, educator and mentor, sustainability professional with 13+ years of multi sectoral experience, experienced curriculum and course designer, independent researcher and writer, proposal mentor, UN SDG coordinator/education, curriculum advisor - WADA, co-founder - Sustainable ADA, education and sustainability lead - Global Policy House, founder and publishing editor - Bona Fide Info.
• Simon Fleck: Catalyst Swarm core member, Cardano enthusiast since 2018, IT background.
• Stefan Montalbetti: Certified Educator (Canadian B. Ed.), Facilitator (7+ years of experience), Disruptor - Member of the Catalyst Swarm with a keen desire to unlock the potential of individuals and bridge gaps to that potential. Foundations: Empathy, Inclusion, Communication, and Critical & Creative Thinking.
• Stephen Whitenstall: Stephen Whitenstall has 30 years' experience in organizing academic, community and business projects. He develops, maintains documentation and provides technical project management support for Catalyst Swarm. As QA-DAO he tracks and documents the Catalyst Circle and maintains 'Ekphrasis' a repository of academic content from across the Cardano community.
• Tevo Saks: I enjoy documenting systems and procedures that will achieve specific goals in an efficient way. Active participant in Catalyst since Fund 1, Catalyst Swarm core member, experienced Proposer and Veteran Community Advisor.
• Victor Corcino: Veteran Community Advisor (vCA), Proposal Mentor, CAs' elected representative for the 1st Catalyst Circle, co-creator of the Community Tools (Proposer/CA/vCA/Voter Tools), Catalyst Swarm core member, engineering/science/developer and 'hands-on' teaching background. 

Budget

• Dev - Basic environment setup 4h
• Design - visual identity for the website 5h
• Design - Sitemap definition 5h
• Design - Wireframe definition 10h
• Design - Graphics layout development 40h
• Dev - Domain Model implementation 15h
• Dev - Import/parsing mechanism from Git / Markdown / Gitbook 10h
• Dev - Controllers / Frontend for: Courses / Workshops, Students Profile, Questions 50h
• Dev - Controllers / Frontend for: Quiz&Test, Events and Calendar 25h
• Dev - BETA release (11th week) 5h
• Dev - Auditing, feedback, bug-fixing 15h
• Dev - PUBLIC release 5h
• Content - nr. 4 Quiz/test creation 15h

Cost per hour: 50$

• Total Design and Graphics: 60 hours x 50$ = 3000$
• Total Development: 125 hours x 50$ = 6250$
• Content creation: 15 hours x 50$ = 750$
• Domain and Hosting: Laravel Forge 19$ / month * 12 months: 228$

Total: 10228$

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